Taken from – https://www.christies.com/features/Giorgio-Morandi-guide-10098-3.aspx

In 1993, in a speech at the inauguration of the Morandi Museum in Bologna, Italian novelist, Umberto Eco hailed Morandi as a ‘poet of matter’, marvelling at ‘how so much spirituality can be expressed… through such humble items’.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Natura morta, painted in 1939. 12⅝ x 22¼ in (32 x 56.5 cm). Sold for £2,546,500 on 16 October 2015 at Christie’s in London © DACS 2019

In Natura morta (above), painted in 1939, a rhythm is created from left to right by the undulating heights of the objects in a row, as well as by their rich alternations in colour (vermilion being the most striking). Morandi’s gift was to transform a group of quotidian vessels into a composition that looked timeless.

‘It takes me weeks to make up my mind which group of bottles go well with a particular tablecloth,’ Morandi once said. ‘And yet still  I often go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast.’Painstaking preparation and a sense of permanence

This sometimes included stretching his own canvases and grinding his own pigment. A rare oval-shaped canvas — one of just two he ever made — actually holds the world auction record for the artist. Natura morta (1940) sold for $4.3 million in May 2018, as part of The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller.